About the new Navigation Panel

Dear Seekers,

Thank you for the feedback regarding the new Navigation Panel we implemented this week!

First this, if you see the new icons displayed in a column, rather than in a line, please refresh your cache, so that the latest layout is used. Usually we solve this with a file name change, forcing browsers to update their cached layout file, but seems this time it wasn't working 100%.

Second, please bear in mind that the new Navigation Panel is a work in progress, there's indeed room available for additional buttons and nothing is already added permanently.

The original goal was to display the cool-down of candy timers, yet adding this additional information increased the height of the navigation panel. As we wanted to keep the height exactly the same, the link to the letters was replaced by an Icon, maintaining the same navigation size.

It's perfectly possible to place the link of the letters back as it were and use an icon for the events instead, showing if the Seeker has a new event or not. This is a choice we as community can make, based on what the majority of people would prefer. An in-game poll could settle this.

The button for drinks now lead to the potions, however it's easily changed to drinks. Again, it's whatever the majority would prefer. The time it requires for me to change this isn't a big deal.

Additional buttons can and will be added in time, again based on what the community sees fit. but at the moment it's not our highest priority.

Overall, I'm a fan of more info available without having to click down into multiple sub-pages (so I like where the new look is going).  There is still more room in the button row, so let's use it! 

You could develop (over time, of course) a list of icons that each player could choose to include, based on how we each play.

Possibilities include:
Journal
Actual drinks (yes, we could have both drinks AND potions on the same row - shocking, I know!)
A shortcut for followers, bank, market, workshop, etc ...

If you built these as options and let players customize the "shortcut" row, it could really simplify gameplay.

As always: thanks for making this game, Aro! 

Edit - Also, you could have the buttons grayscale when not available (sweets on cooldown, no new mail, drinks used up for the day, etc), and then 'pop' in color when they become 'available' to make it more eye-catching and easier to notice.

The idea itself is good.
I don't see the immediate need to have more shortcuts, we already have the "Daily Tasks" that can serve that role to have personalized shortcuts, and food and inventory, quests etc. on the regular left-side menu.
It appears, sometimes less can be more. Not every item on the left-side menu needs to be a shortcut to a number of different aspects of the game.

Perhaps instead of asjusting the items yourself for everyone, you could do it similar to the daily tasks: Let us customize the shortcuts as we see it helpful. Some Seekers may require drinks (beer/milk/soups) as good addition, some prefer potions, some want a shortcut to their farm, to fields, to the workshop, to the library/universary, etc. 

As mentioned before, most of these things can already be linked at the Daily Tasks, so adding more? Dunno, perhaps over time it will make things easier to have 1-2 clicks fewer to reach our targets: e.g. drinks/sweets can be just as easy accessed by clicking on the food status, then change "tabs" to see the chosen item.

I do like to be able to see sweets and drinks...  However, to be honest: I would be careful with adding more and more icons, buttons and shortcuts as been suggested.  Yep, there's space for it.  However, when you log in and end up on the character page you currently have 48 buttons... Excluding those in the announcements, daily tasks and the online seeker profiles + message icons. 

48! They are everywhere... Some as text, others as button, icon or image. It's confusing. And that's only the 'me-page'...  I would say that sometimes less is more. Especially for the newer players.  Actually: even after 3 years I still manage to click the wrong buttons or even notice buttons that are very useful, but I never noticed before. 

I really like the effort to simplify the navigation, but I'd say it could be worth the effort to gather some insights about what people want to do and how they navigate and check whether you can overhaul the navigation all at once, instead of spending a lot of time on adding additional seperate buttons and options. (I understand that it would take a lot of time to figure that out and implement it though...) Or, as Ragnar suggests: it could be a solution to make it customizable. You could keep the navigation simple and clean in the beginning, while more experienced players that know where they want to go can add dozens of shortcuts (and that could replace the daily tasks as well...)

Another addition: I don't know if you have any statistics whether people visit TGL on mobile or on desktop... But I can imagine those icons are mostly useful for desktop, since hovering over buttons to get additional information about what they mean doesn't work smoothly on mobile. Clicking on the old letter button is much easier then.  But, if most are playing on desktop I can imagine an icon is enough.
 
BTW: I'd prefer drinks over potions for that icon.

I definitely enjoy the new navigational panel and it's further potential to make playing easier.
Freya does make a good point about it being extremely useful for desktop players in comparison to mobile. (As a mobile user myself I can say some buttons are hard to hit without zooming in) but the game itself seems to be meant more for PC users anyways. So I can't really complain. I do prefer the drinks icon over the potion icon, a good polling would solve alot of the preference issues.

I liked a lot of what Ragnar and Pan said in regards to making the panel user customizable like the task list. Although I'm unsure the amount of coding it would require to accomplish that... If it's a lot of work for that I'd say shelf that idea for sure.

For some reason I fail to see why adding more and more buttons and small symbols to the navigation improves anything.
Not everything needs a shortcut on the main screen when it gets so cluttered that you can't tell which is which anymore.
Also think of people playing on mobile devices. In that regard the game is a horror (fixed width elements, all very small, ...) and not responsive to different screen sizes (but that's another issue unrelated to the nav bar alone).

I don't know, why is money in the personal info (above nav bar) now displayed as ... colored plates? Dirty dishes? Cookies? Coins? Looks like good intentions but why like that.